Field of the Invention
This invention is concerned with butter and margarine that has been flow filled into rigid, single walled, non-reversible, unlined, multi-cubic-dimensioned, thermoplastic formed, embossed surfaced, cup-like cavities that mold such food products into the shape and surface designs of such cavities, and then demold such products from such cavities with the embossed surfaced design of the products intact.
The manual art of molding embossed surfaces on butter is quite ancient. But as a commercial art, using the technique of flow filling into embossing walled packages, it is only about twenty years old. Its commercial practice with butter has been growing slowly during this time. Because of this slow growth with butter, no commercial demand has appeared yet in margarine.
The purpose of this art is not simply one of aesthetics alone; not simply to change a plain cube of fat into a fine-appearing food. It also has some nutritional value. Among nutritionists it is well accepted that a pleasing appearance enhances acceptance and consumption of any food. Because of this, some hospitals now serve my restaurant size embossed butter pats on their meal trays. Thus, any improvement in the costs and conveniences in using my embossed pats should also result in an improved market.
The table fats, butter and margarine, have been one of the last of the grocery-type consumables to lend themselves to the progress of appearance enhancement. And, despite considerable development effort, this area has failed to gain any extensive commercial acceptance. As the invention will show, the reasons for this have been diverse and, even for one skilled in this art, a cure for the reasons has been difficult to achieve.
Since butter especially has body characteristics that are fixed by legal definitions of its content, and therefore cannot be modified to meet special demands of the market, it appeared to me that such special demands had to be met, if at all, by a modification of the packages used to form embossed designs on table fats. But how? The approach and answers to this question are contained in the following description of the invention.